Bashiok on Bloody Floors, White Noise, and Graphics

Posted By: June 4, 2009

A fan allowed that corpses have to vanish since they impact the performance… how about just leaving the blood? Bashiok replied:

Even decals, which are textures, impact performance. So there has to be some limit on how many of them are allowed to linger and for how long. We have to try to strike a balance somewhere. Also, a ground literally covered with corpses or blood becomes less and less interesting, more and more confusing, and can actually create some frustration.

Regarding visible markers, we put a lot of effort into building rooms and areas to ensure that the randomly generated dungeons are indeed random, but also not confusing and maze-like. We don’t want everything to look the same. So in that respect a visual marker of a blood spot or corpse really shouldn’t be necessary.

Elsewhere, a fan posted a lengthy, impassioned, and fairly-incomprehensible plea for Diablo III to be more um… Diablo-y? Not like WoW or SC? That’s about all the sense I could make of his post. Bashiok may have achieved greater comprehension, or perhaps he’s just pretending, with his irreducibly-brief rejoinder.

No.

He made sure his word was the final one by locking the thread, an act some other readers took exception to.

You, posting : “No.” In a thread, even to lock it right after, is disappointing to say the least. So what, you want to look smart ? as much as those people who just post “No.” instead of explaining why they agree or does not ? Well, sure way to keep a bad trend healthy. “Hey kid, want to look cool ? if you have not already, do like Bashiok, just write “No.” in a thread where some people tried hard to intelligibly explain themselves” Way to go.

Bashiok: You’re right, and I apologize. But, the issue isn’t really that I was dismissive. The real issue is my unwillingness to be forced to read the same few words over and over and again. Look at a few pictures from people playing too many FPS’ with 13 hours of gameplay. I’m only going to repeat myself so much, you know? At some point it becomes white noise.

I shouldn’t expect that everyone has read every little thing said about the game, but the soul can only take so much regurgitation.

http://www.blizzblues.com/diablo3

Read up.

Finally, Bashiok posted a lengthy defense of Diablo III’s graphics, in reply to someone who is unhappy with the current “jagged” look of the characters. It’s got no game info and it’s quite long, so it’s below the fold. Click through to read it all.

The characters in motion look like 16 bit, maybe 32-bit.

Bashiok: The bit numbers are indeed helpful when referring to certain era’s of console gaming, but they were essentially marketing numbers. They’re no more useful than hertz ratings for modern processors. You have to understand the performance as a whole, not just one number. In any case, I guess you’re saying our game looks like an SNES title. Which I would take offense to if it wasn’t so ridiculous.

The edges of the characters look jagged.

Bashiok: What you’re probably referring to is called aliasing. It’s the jagged appearance on the edges of (generally) polygons. It’s usually resolved through use of processes collectively referred to as anti-aliasing, which we don’t have implemented.

The NUMBER ONE reason i did not play diablo II for the first year or 2 was because it was behind its time in graphics

Bashiok: That period of time was probably the worst of what I’d call graphical discrimination. People were buying these new-fangled 3D add in cards, and if you were going to play a game it damn well better use it! Technically Diablo II was (and still runs best) in Glide (the 3dfx API) but if it didn’t have polygons… pshhh! My friends aren’t going to be jealous of that, forget it!

Still, the Diablo franchise has managed to sell approximately 20 million copies.

So maybe there isn’t as much graphical discrimination as there seems, maybe it’s just the people and communities we immerse ourselves in that makes it seem like there is.

Maybe if your friends were all amateur or semi-pro race car drivers, you hung out on car racing forums and chat rooms, and worked on and drove your own hobby race car, you’d think pretty poorly of the Toyota Camry… no matter that it was the third best selling car in 2008. After two pick-up trucks.

This is post MGS4, will be post FFXIII, post Killzone 2, ect. you should not only be competing with these games graphically but surpassing them.

Bashiok: Those are console games. Without going in to it too much, they have one hardware spec to develop for which allows for games that really push the hardware to its limit because they know for a fact that no one is going to have a machine that is any less or more powerful than the one they’re developing for.

We’re developing a PC game, which has the one downside of an almost infinite number of hardware configurations. We have good guesses as to what most people have in their computers, and we develop our games for a wide range of scalability.

While we’re not developing a cutting edge game, I look at the screenshots and videos and I hope and wait for a time when everyone can play it in person. Because no matter what quality they’re released in it’s just nowhere near as good as seeing it and playing it for yourself